The Actor Yamashita Mangiku I as Lady Yuya (Yuya Gozen) (?) in the Play Heike Hyobanki (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Seventh Month, 1789 (?)

This eighteenth-century yakusha-e, preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago and indexed through ukiyo-e.org under Natori Shunsen's name as part of the institution's broader ukiyo-e cataloging, depicts the onnagata actor Yamashita Mangiku I in the role of Lady Yuya (Yuya Gozen) in the play Heike Hyobanki, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the seventh month of 1789. Question marks in the museum's title acknowledge the tentative identifications of play, role, and venue, a common state of affairs for late eighteenth-century actor prints. Yuya Gozen, a Heike-era court lady associated with the noh play Yuya and frequently revisited in kabuki adaptations, allowed the onnagata performer to display refined court bearing and reflective grace. The figure is shown in the slim, full-length single-actor format characteristic of Tenmei- and Kansei-era yakusha-e, with the firm contours, attentively observed court robes, and stylized facial expression that defined the period's actor portraiture. Although Natori Shunsen's own reputation rests on the twentieth-century shin-hanga movement and his long-running Shunsen nigao shu portrait series produced with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, museum cataloging here groups this earlier Edo print under his name as part of its wider ukiyo-e holdings. The impression therefore offers a productive comparison with Shunsen's own twentieth-century onnagata portraits, since both belong to the long tradition by which the actor print sought to render the particular bearing of a specific performer in a specific role.